predictions

“We believe good companies grow from $1 million to $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in four years, but the best companies can do it in just two years.”
Original source: The State of the Cloud Industry in 2018

‘At the top of the list, I would place New York, the greatest headquarters city in the world, and DC, the world’s power corridor. When I asked Scott Galloway, the author of the book “The Four,” where he thought Amazon would place its new headquarters, he simply said: New York, New York, and New York. But, DC is perhaps an equal or even better contender. Because Jeff Bezos already owns The Washington Post, an additional 50,000 Amazon jobs in the DC area might help deflect Congressional attention from his company’s monopolistic tendencies. Not to mention, a key predictor of corporate headquarters location is where the CEO has a home. Bezos has homes in DC, Manhattan, and Beverly Hills, which might also explain LA’s inclusion on the list.’

“The rush is on for enterprises to build and deploy better software faster, and that’s going to drive a doubling of PaaS adoption — both on premises and in the cloud — in the next 18 months,” Bartoletti said. “In some industries, like financial services and retail, leaders are already differentiating by how well they release high-quality experiences, and many of them are using a Cloud Foundry- or Kubernetes-based container development platform to speed up even further.”
Original source: App development teams brace for big change in 2018

“30% of web browsing will be done via voice by 2020, according to the technology research firm Gartner. Presumably, a large chunk of those search commands could be monetized.”
Original source: The latest media pivot: voice

“Vendor lock-in is not the hardest thing to overcome, Architectural lock-in is harder to overcome. If you built your new app components today optimizing for constraints of a VM, you will have a harder time moving to future than migrating an app from AWS to GCP. For example, using Kubernetes for new workloads creates an architecture lock-in that you will have a harder time getting out of it and move to serverless. Even people migrating off of Oracle tech have reaped plenty of benefits from using Oracle stack for last 10–15 years. The current benefits of committing to a platform outweigh the future cost.”Link to original

‘I’ll tell you something that’s not fantasy. In the next few years, Red Hat will become the first billion-dollar-a-quarter open-source company, and that’s real money… Here’s how. First, as Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat CEO, said in the earnings call, “We anticipate exiting the fiscal year with an annualized run-rate of approximately $3 billion for total revenue.”’

The wider Cloud Native ecosystem is, however, a very disparate and confused place. We anticipate a significant level of consolidation over the next twelve to eighteen months with some clear winners emerging. The emergence of several opinionated distributions of Kubernetes is hardly a surprise and this space will expand a little further before settling down.

“[Gartner analyst Arup Roy] said Indian [IT services] companies, for example, should not expect double-digit sales revenue growth in 2017, adding that ‘a sub 10% growth for 2017 is certain.'”

But, the effect is likely to be on all large organizations who have been globalizing IT staffing:

“There is really no such thing as the Indian IT services sector. All companies would be affected. For example, Capgemini employs more people in India that in any other country. Legislation does not differentiate between Infosys, Capgemini or Accenture,” said Schumacher.

And:

In 2013, German car manufacturer Daimler said it planned to achieve savings of €150m a year by bringing IT services in-house and expanding IT operations in India and Turkey. In 2012, General Motors said it would insource around 90% of its heavily outsourced IT operations.

We talked about more “Trump’s possible effects on tech” in last week’s Software Defined Talk, with some extensive links and notes in the show notes if you don’t want to fill your ear-holes.

In the last 15 years, application delivery has moved from being bound to physical servers to running on virtual machines with a full operating system and now to containers with Docker where developers can specify every aspect of deployment, he added.

The move has also been a shift from a heavyweight application deployment model to a lightweight model that takes less time to start up and deploy applications. Additionally, there has been a move from being bound to a single closed-source vendor to an open-source model with multiple vendors, less risk of lock-in and more choice.

And, on the maturity front:

not all organizations are ready for the move, according to Donnie Berkholz, research director at 451 Group. He pointed to a recent survey his firm conducted that found that most IT organizations are still running lots of manual process and aren’t in the DevOps world, and many aren’t even using agile development methods either. For cloud native to make sense, organizations need to make use of continuous integration and continuous development technologies, Berkholz said.

“You can’t do cloud native if you don’t have the right processes to support it,” Berkholz said. “For some of the world, it’s a long way to go on the journey to cloud native, and it will take at least five years to get there.”